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-{{a|tech|}}One of the [[Holy Grails of reg tech]] is [[natural language processing]]: some varieties of the same thing: a machine that reads contracts for you. This could come in the following articulations:
+{{a|tech|}}A great hope of [[reg tech]] is [[natural language processing]], which presents itself in a handful of varieties of the same thing: a machine that reads {{t|contract}}s for you.
-*'''Data extraction''': Crawling over your portfolio of 40,000 {{isdama}}s<ref>You know, the ones printed on faded waxy fax paper and languishing in filing cabinets around the trading floor; the ones scanned into a 57 MB tiff file along with three amendments, forty pages of specimen signatures, a power of attorney, hand-annotated emails from Credit and the five key pages of the Schedule missing; the ones that are misfiled as Swiss [[rahmenrvertrag]]s; the ones that are just not there at all.</ref> to extract the 60 key [[trading]] and [[credit]] terms out of them that the firm neglected to collect over the last 25 years while it was signing them up;
+===Examples===
+*'''Data extraction''': Crawling over your portfolio of 40,000 {{isdama}}s<ref>You know, the ones printed on faded waxy fax paper and languishing in filing cabinets around the trading floor; the ones scanned into a 57 MB tiff file along with three amendments, forty pages of specimen signatures, a power of attorney, hand-annotated emails from Credit and the five key pages of the Schedule missing; the ones that are misfiled as Swiss [[rahmenvertrag]]s; the ones that are just not there '' at all''.</ref> to extract the 60 key [[trading]] and [[credit]] terms out of them that the firm neglected to collect over the last 25 years while it was signing them up;
 *'''Legal agreement review''': algorithmically scanning standard-form {{t|contract}}s<ref>To date, only one any one has successfully managed is the one that no-one really cares about: the [[confidentiality agreement]]</ref> to identify key terms and risk provisions and save human lawyers from that tedious chore;
 *'''[[Chat bots]]''': An online, chat buddy to whom [[Sales]] can basic legal questions, thereby saving [[Sales]] the aggravation of having to talk to the [[legal eagles]], and [[legal]] the utter [[tedium]] of having to answer the exact same question to the exact [[Sales]] person three or four times daily.
-Now reading any text involves judgment, interpretation and negotiation of ambiguity — and bringing to the text the reader’s own understanding of the legal background — while legal language is crafted to avoid ambiguity — {{maxim|there are no metaphors in a trust deed}} — there are still infinite ways of expressing the same idea, and if there is one part of the imagination a lawyer loves to stretch, it is inventing burlesque ways of saying simple things. Understand a well-formed English sentence is not just a matter of applying basic rules of language. It is a dynamic process.
+Now reading any text involves judgment, interpretation and negotiation of ambiguity — and bringing to the text the reader’s own understanding of the legal background — while legal language is crafted to avoid ambiguity — {{maxim|there are no metaphors in a trust deed}} — there are still infinite ways of expressing the same idea, and if there is one part of the imagination a lawyer loves to stretch, it is the part  that invents burlesque ways of saying simple things.
+In any case, to understand a well-formed English sentence is not just a matter of applying basic rules of language. It is a dynamic process. So expect [[natural language processing]] to be easier said than done.
+And so it proves.
+===Legal agreement review===
+:“''[[AI]] can only follow instructions. The [[meatware]] can make a call that the instructions are stupid.''”
+There is a well-known and widely-feted [[natural language processing]] application<ref>Which shall remain nameless, though you don’t have to be a total ''nerd'' to know who we have in mind.</ref> which purports to save resources and reduce risk by performing a preliminary review of, say, [[confidentiality agreement]]s against a preconfigured [[playbook]].
+The idea is [[triage]]. The application scans the agreement and, using its [[natural language processing]], will pick up the policy points, compare them with the [[playbook]] and highlight them so the poor benighted lawyer can quickly deal with the points and respond to the negotiation. The software [[vendor]] proudly points to a comparison of their software against human equivalents in picking up policy points in a sample of agreements. The software got 94% of the points. The [[meatware]] only got 67%. The Software was quicker. And — chuckle — it needed less coffee. Headline: ''dumb machine beats skilled human''.
+But this may highlight a shortfall, not a feature, in the application. The day a [[palaver]] of [[risk controller]]s set their [[playbook]] parameters at their ''exact'' hard walkaway point is the day [[Good luck, Mr. Gorsky|Mr. Gorsky]] gets to the moon. So, not everything in the [[playbook]] ''says'' is a problem really ''is'' a problem. Much of a playback will be filled with [[nice-to-have]]s and other paranoid ramblings of a [[chicken licken]] somewhere in a controller group. The very value a lawyer brings is to see a point and say, “yeah, that’s fine, jog on, nothing to see here”. That is the one thing a natural language-processing [[AI]] can’t do: the [[AI]] can’t make that value judgment and will recommend that you negotiate ''all'' playbook points, regardless of how stupid they are.<ref>True: this isn’t the AI’s fault, but it ''is'' inevitable, and it ''is'' the AI’s limitation.</ref> Now if the person operating the [[AI]] is an experienced lawyer, she can override the [[AI]]’s fecklessness, and just ignore it.
+But the point here is to [[Downgrading - waste article|down-skill]] and save costs, remember. The operator will ''not'' be an experienced lawyer. It will be an out-of-work actor in downtown Bratislava who is juggling some [[ISDA]] work with a bar job and and an Uber gig. He will be possessed of little common sense, no legal training, and will neither know nor care for “the sensible thing to do”. He will follow the machine’s recommendations slavishly — he is, after all, its slave.
+Hence: a wildly elongated, pointless negotiation that will waste time and aggravate the client.
+[[AI]] can only follow instructions.The [[meatware]] can make a call that the instructions are stupid.
+===Division of labour===
+And besides, having the [[AI]] spot the issues and asking the [[meatware]] to fix the drafting gets the [[triage]] squarely backwards. Picking up the points — and recognising the large stupid tracts in the [[playbook]]<ref>Much of the [[playbook]] will be non-essential “perfect world” recommendations (“[[nice-to-have]]s”) which an experienced negotiator would quickly be able to wave through.</ref> — is the “high value work”. That is what the [[meatware]] should be doing. Fixing the drafting is the dreary detail. That is where you want your [[chatbot]]. But contextually amending human language — you know, ''actual'' “natural language processing” — is ''hard''. No {{t|AI}} that we have seen just yet can do it.
+===Did I miss something?===
+And how comfortable can we really be that the AI ''has'' spotted everything? If we assume — colour me cynical — the “natural language processing” isn’t quite as sophisticated as its marketers would have you believe<ref>That is is a glorified key-word search, in other words.</ref> then it is a bit [[reckless]] to put your faith in the [[reg tech]]. Is there no human wordsmith who could fool the [[AI]]?<ref>I bet I could. It is hardly challenging to insert an [[indemnity]] which does not use the words “[[indemnity]]”, “[[hold harmless]]” or “[[reimbursement|reimburse]]”.</ref> what if there is an odious clause not anticipated by the [[playbook]]?<ref>Given how fantastically paranoid a gathering of [[risk controller]]s can be this seems a remote risk, I grant you, but risks are [[fractal]], remember. And [[emergent]] in unexpectable ways. The [[collective noun]] for a group of [[risk controller]]s is a [[Palaver]], by the way.</ref> If the meatware can’t wholly trust the AI to have identified '''all''' salient points the lawyer must ''still'' read the whole agreement to check. Ergo, no time or cost saving.
+But this software is designed to facilitate “right-sourcing” the negotiation to cheaper (ergo less experienced) negotiators who will rely on the playbook as guidance, will not have the experience to make a commercial judgement unaided and will therefore be obliged either to [[escalate]], or to engage on a slew of [[nice-to-have]] but bottom-line unnecessary negotiation points with the counterparty. Neither are good outcomes. Again, an example of [[reg tech]] creating [[waste]] in a process where investment in experienced human personnel would avoid it.
+The basic insight here is that if a process is sufficiently low in value that experienced personnel are not justified, it should be fully automated rather than partially automated and populated by inexperienced personnel
+===What is it with [[Confi]]s?===
+Note this [[natural language processing]] only every seems to work with [[confidentiality agreement]]s — surely the most pointless legal contracts — wait, wait: hear me out folks — one will encounter in a daily grind. They are well known for only containing the same 6 points — an infinite means of saying them. One never sues<ref>Well: have ''you'' ever sued, or been sued under one?</ref> under a [[confidentiality agreement]] because the loss you would suffer under them is by definition a [[consequential loss]] shot through with your own [[contributory negligence]].
 {{ref}}